You can get BattleDuel here and the official website is to be found here.

While the latest incarnation of BattleDuel has been optimized for the iPhone it also plays very well on the iPad. Though BattleDuel needs to be run in iPhone app mode (e.g. artificially enlarging it) on the iPad and the menus as a result look somewhat pixellated, the game itself is marvellously fresh and crisp and the graphics are great. And all the old excitement is back.

I should note that some features of earlier BattleDuel versions are missing (e.g. the network mode) but I don’t really miss them so far. Nonetheless the huge amount of game play modes (team, duel, etc.) and the reasonable number of weapon types as well as the configurability of the game itself make BattleDuel the best artillery duel game I know.

Highly recommended!

And believe me: I’m not just recommending this game because Jochen is a good friend. I’m recommending it because it’s a really great game and Jochen has spent a lot of effort in testing it intensely. The gameplay itself is probably known to most people around since artillery duel games are almost as old as computers. But this is one of the most fun ones I know because it focusses on the important features and doesn’t allow to get all kind of funky glitz into your way.

Very enjoyable!

My bet is:

• In at most three years Google will be giving away mobile phones for free.
• Including the contract so that you can talk and SMS and … for free.
• Using voice over IP.

Thus totally disrupting the current telecommunications market. And why? Do win over the total control over the mobile market and finally use all the content they control for great effect in everyday life. Imagine a Google “egg” that - besides allowing to talk - will hint towards best prices, navigate through foreign cities, take photos and link them with your Tweets, blog and what else including a means to use Google Earth to follow your path through the day.

Big brother? Yes. Compelling? Somewhat as far as I am concerned.

And yes, I know there are quite a few questions to be solved in order to be able to handle all the data load involved with voice over IP and so on (oh yes, forgot to mention that - VOIP or something similar probably will be the way - there really is no need for two nets - Internet should be enough).

So - laugh at me

And what did we get ?

A truly amazing movie. While the story is similar to “Dances With Wolves” in more than one respect everything else just fits. The special effects are really great. The characters are well done (even my wife who initially said “uuhh, silly blue figures… I don’t want to see that” loved them), the aliens are really believable, the science (for someone like me) well done, the sounds effects and the score were great, the story pacing was great…nothing to complain about.Even the 3D technology was used with great care… and mostly for very good effect.

But please, Hollywood: Just don’t give us a lousy followup. This masterpiece is done. And well done at that.

Thanks, James. A truly amazing movie.

My recommendation: If you need to see one movie in the coming twelve months (or 24) - make it “Avatar”.

SAGA is a governmental guideline in Germany covering the architecture, methods and technologies to be used in e-government applications. SAGA is thought to be an open standard but up to now it has been living in a kind of secluded environment, mostly because a small circle of experts has been growing the standard.

The SAGA standard is relevent for anyone working for governmental IT projects… sometimes more, sometimes less. One of the most observable standards enforced are the regulations about accessibility… quite a challenge in the Web 2.0 world when everyone is clamoring for shiny funky applications and you as the developer need to make the application work, when neither CSS nor JavaScript are available, too. Try that with your home applications

Therefore we at QuinScape started to work on the OpenSAGA framework in 2007. OpenSAGA is a Java- and Spring-based framework that used a model driven approach in order to generate complex web applications from XML based models. Technology is almost completely abstracted out of your code, the generator and the runtime choose the best available technology in order to turn your intentions into running code. This e.g. allows the developer to not even waste one second on questions like “what is my AJAX auto-suggest going to to when JavaScript is turned off or how is my dynamic tree widget going to work?”. The OpenSAGA framework does this (among many other things) for you.

The time suddenly available then can be spend to focus on the business problems at hand which again are described with high level models. And there is more to come… but I don’t want to get ahead of the OpenSAGA website… let’s just say that we at QuinScape are very excited about this brand new framework.

And best of all: It’s going to be open source. Thus even non-government companies can profit from the energy and money spent by government (and spent in such amounts as only the goverment can) and gain a competitive advantage for commercial web applications.

Just stay tuned to the blog at the OpenSAGA website… starting in January 2010 we are going to issue a steady stream of news about the OpenSAGA project culminating in the release party on the 1st of May, 2010.

First of all: I usually enjoy Roland Emmerich movies because they are full of special effects and allow me to spend an hour or three without needing to think… nay… because they usually force me not to think. I like science fiction and fantasy movies and I love special effects. I’m not a stickler for details and I can live with a certain level of suspension of disbelief. And tonight I felt like spending a couple of hours with some nice special effects. So I was well prepared… or so I thought.

So, now about the movie…

First of all the story (no spoilers here… at least no non trivial spoilers): The world ends on december, 21st, 2012, like the Mayas (and some other folks) predicted… kind of. In Roland Emmerichs latest creation neutrinos from sun eruptions mutate (they call it so - I didn’t make that up) and heat Earth’s core until the outer mantle starts to desolidify and everything goes to hell. Billions die, most of the main characters survive and in the end everyone sails into a beautiful sunset (no, I didn’t make that up either).

Thanks Hollywood. This movie has excellent special effects raising the level of disaster movies once more. And it has the most braindead story I have seen for a long time. Heck, even Transformers II was kind of credible compared to this huge heap of bullshit. Plan 9 from Outer Space seems credible and scientifically researched compared to this.

Let’s not talk about the Yellowstone eruption blast being barely strong enough to ruffle the hair of our heroes, let’s not talk about there being no wind at all so that a small aircraft just flies away quite safely, let’s not talk about the ensuing nuclear winter barely lasting long enough for the final sunset, let’s not talk about the absolutely incredible scene when our heroes run out of fuel on their flight from Las Vegas to China (don’t ask), start to go down with their plane and… suddenly discover that the continental shifts resulting from Armageddon by pure luck moved all the continents in exactly such a way that our heroes can land only a few miles away from mankind’s only safe harbor (the heroes even comment their incredible luck… I almost fell out of my chair laughing). There are so many incredible moments in this movie… the main characters being cheered at after accidently causing the death of dozens or possible hundreds of people because they breached hull security the safety arcs to save their lives… cities always getting blown up just seconds after the main characters manage to find yet another plane or car to escape… old shoddy busses driving faster than the magma and heat waves of erupting super volcanoes (the folks at Mount St. Helens probably could have used such busses), ships being thrown against Mount Everest and no passenger being hurt, tsunamis of about 7 kilometers in height, Africa rising something like 9 kilometers and retaining its basic shape, elephants dangling from helicopters in the middle of the Himalaya, earthquakes strong enough to completely annihilate LA and yet not strong enough to stop a limousine on its route through a quickly collapsing city, happy people after about 6.4 billion others died, pathos so dripping and mindless its very hard to bear… probably even for US citizens although they seem to be more resistant to pathos overdoses than other parts of the world… I could go on and on and on.

The story really is incredibly abysmal…

Now for the actors. I really like John Cusack. But this time he didn’t have a chance. His character remains flat and uninteresting and the most sympathetic and believable person in the movie to me was the rather evil russian billionaire. All the rest is forgettable. Even the fictional versions of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel (although they are named differently… I wonder what happened between 2009 and 2012 in that parallel Earth).

So: Watch the movie if you just want some special effects. Do not think about the story. Or rather: Try… hard… not… to… think… about… the… story. It is going to kill. In a best case scenario. It also might turn you into a slobbering zombie.

Now my advice for Hollywood: Save yourself the money for script writers. If you pay any for such movies. Save yourself the money for real actors. There do not seem to be enough memorable characters in these movies to justify the expenses. And do yourself save the money for expensive directors. Just pay for the SFX department and a rudimentary storyboard. Give us a maximum of 60 minutes of SFX where Earth gets (almost) destroyed, cities explode or sink beneath the ocean, etc. pp. This will save you a lot of time and money… and it well help us to save a lot of time, too. And then rejoice: Just count how much time mankind will save if such disasters like 2012 run less than an hour compared to its glorious 158 minutes… the total time saved is probably enough to invent some great new things that will be beneficial for everyone.

Oh dear… what a movie. Glorious SFX… bastard of everything else. I’m exhausted now.

…the following picture:

And I believe I know this place… it’s in the Aitutaki lagoon on the Cook islands and Melanie and I have been standing at exactly this  spot a couple of months ago. It’s one corner of One Foot Island if I am correct. Cute We have some very cool pictures of us from that remote corner of the world

BTW, it’s perhaps the most beautiful place in the world I have ever seen… it makes you cry and in real it looks even more beautiful than on the pictures… even if that is hard to believe. But it’s something I’m not going to forget ever… and I want to get back there at some point… oh, the beauty. The tranquility. The serenity. Incredible.

Disclaimer: This entry has been written while listening to the talk. Please forgive me any typographical or grammatical errors resulting from this approach.

Agim Emruli from SpringSource and Papick Taboada from pgt technology scouting GmbH are going to present the latest news about the SpringSource dm server, especially related to Java EE development and more lightweight deployment approaches. Since I regard the dm server as one of the more exciting technologies these days I’m always keen on updates in this area. Stay with me…

Agim and Papick are going to present how the dm server can help to mediate class dependencies in projects. As an observation they note that projects and framework which include repackage third party libraries are a typical indicator for OSGi use cases.

Papick afterwards gives the short standard introduction to how OSGi works. He then introduces the Bundle concept as a new module concept between classes and WARs or EARs. Also well-known. Next he explains how proxying, dynamic service lookup, etc. works.

Next Agim explains the important additions of the dm server:

• installing applications (not just bundles),
• defined handling for multi-threading,
• configuration files,
• a management console and more.

He also mentions that the SpringSource dm server is a GPL based open source product and he mentions the GPL FAQ on the SpringSource website.

As deployment options he explains using WAR files due to the embedded Tomcat in the dm Server, which provides a perfect combination of deploying WAR based applications that also can enjoy the benefits of OSGi. This positions the dm Server well above standard OSGi environments which out of the box do not provide any support for web applications. Additionally the existing application bloat can be reduced by just repackaging the application without changing any code. The common libraries are extracted as OSGi based libraries which are installed in the server. Next the services should be extracted to be able to install them as OSGi components.

So the way from WAR to OSGi-enabled application is:

• Take the existing WAR with external libraries, internal services and misc resources.
• Repackage the application WAR as a shared library WAR. The libraries are externalized by installing them in the dm server.
• What is missing in the current enterprise is a bundle repository that provides manifest files for bundling OSGi-enabled external libraries. SpringSource provides a bundle repository for such OSGi-enabled JARs. More than 400 open source libraries have so far been processed manually to provide this infrastructure. Additionally SpringSource provides a tool named Bundlor for manifest generation. Bundlor analyzes the underlying project and builds a manifest file with the help of a template and a project profile.
• In the final step the SpringSource dm server introduces the concept of a PAR (program archive) which is a collection of OSGi bundles that make up a program.

Additionally the dm server corrects some OSGi problems with libraries that are not appropriately implemented. An example for Hibernate is presented - Hibernate uses the thread class loader in one place instead of the system class loader which leads to problems with the OSGi standard. SpringSource introduces a new scope (application) for libraries in PAR files which helps to resolve such visibility issues.

Next Agim shows the example from many well-known SpringSource dm demos showing how it is possible to start, stop and exchange parts of a web application without compromising the runtime stability. Not something you want to do in production environments but still something you usually cannot do with a standard OSGi environment but only due to the dm server. I would argue that there are some critical hot fix situations in production environments where it might be very useful to do exactly that - it just must not become standard procedure

Next Agim introduces a modularization concept for web applications which leaves the service layer (which already was modularized with bundles) but rather the actual web layer. This part of the demo is a technology study of a system that is currently under development for the dm server called slices. Slices basically are vertical modules for the system (e.g. a reporting slice, an order slice or whatever) which can be - like other OSGi bundles - activated and deactivated for individual web applications. Personally I am not quite sure how this conceptual dispatching infrastructure will work in cooperation with security guidelines, user management, user navigations and other important parts of a web application but future releases surely will shed more light on this. As Agim mentioned slices currently are pre-alpha, so we’ll have to wait a little but until the SpringSource dm server 2.0 (or even later) will be released. dm server 2.0 currently is under development with milestone 6 being available. According to the plan a release candidate should appear during this quarter.

Technically the presentation was well-done, but I’m afraid I already have heard too much about OSGi to learn anything new from this talk… which is not the fault of the presenters.